An Escape Plan Stayed Hidden At a Fatal Fire

By AL BAKER; William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

Published: October 3, 2007

Contractors demolishing the former Deutsche Bank building made a special plan to allow emergency use of the sealed stairs, but firefighters who responded to the fire on Aug. 18 did not know of the plan, according to official documents and interviews.

The stairwells were sealed with heavy plywood and plastic to prevent toxic materials from escaping and hinged trap doors were put in the plywood slabs, yet the escape plan was never brought to the attention of firefighters assigned to respond to a fire in the building, fire officials say.

Two firefighters were killed in the blaze.

''The Fire Department was not involved in creating this plan, specifically -- and most importantly -- with regard to the sealed staircases,'' said Francis X. Gribbon, the department's chief spokesman. ''We were not notified about it. We were not consulted about it.''

As a result, scores of firefighters were forced to scramble down exterior scaffolding or seek other escape routes. The two firefighters who were killed, Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino, were found near a sealed stairwell on the 14th floor, one of them actually atop the plywood slab.

Fire officials said they could not say at this point what actions, if any, the two firefighters might have taken to escape by the stairs before the men collapsed.

Firefighters on other floors where the stairwells were also sealed resorted to using power saws to cut through the plywood because they did not know about the trap doors, according to fire commanders, who said they felt the trap doors were too narrow to be effective.

The emergency escape plan was developed last year by the John Galt Corporation, the contractor hired to demolish the building at ground zero, which was damaged in the 9/11 terrorist attack and contaminated with toxic dust blown in by the collapse of the twin towers. The point of sealing the stairwells was to meet the standards set by environmental regulators who feared that decontamination efforts could create dangerous pollution in Lower Manhattan.

The general contractor on the job, Bovis Lend Lease, had sent a copy of its escape plans to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the owners of the building.

The plan was posted on the agency's Web site, but it is unclear who else was officially notified of the emergency arrangement. A spokesman for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Errol Cockfield, was asked over a period of days if the memo or any other notice of the plan had been forwarded to the Fire Department, but declined to comment, citing the criminal investigation under way.

The emergency plan described on the Web site was eventually revised, but fire officials said they were not alerted to any version prior to the fire and would have objected to both because of the risks involved.

Although fire officials acknowledge that the trap doors might have provided some means of escape, they said the doors would not have been adequate for large firefighters operating in heavy gear in spaces darkened by smoke.

Mary Costello, a spokeswoman for Bovis Lend Lease, said it had fulfilled its responsibility by turning its contractor's escape plan over to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Ordinarily, she said, such a plan would then have been distributed to a variety of agencies. She said she did not know what had happened in this case.

A spokeswoman for the city's Buildings Department, which is overseeing some aspects of the demolition, said she could not comment on whether her department had been alerted to the escape plan, citing the criminal investigation being conducted by the Manhattan district attorney's office.

What is clear from interviews with firefighters and their commanders, though, is that the units that went to the building had no idea that the sealed panels had trap doors.

Firefighters may be the most important recipients of such information, said J. Brent Kynoch, the managing director of Environmental Information Association, which specializes in abatement of hazardous materials, ''because in the event of an emergency you want those people to know what they are facing as they enter the building.

''In the case of the Deutsche Bank building, a building that has had so much press and attention, it's unconscionable that the Fire Department was not notified,'' he said.

Prosecutors and fire officials studying the fire have already determined that several factors contributed to the confusion that day. For one thing, the standpipe for water supply had been dismantled and was useless, which delayed the first arrival of water on the fire.

Responding fire companies also encountered an unusual phenomenon: though fire and smoke usually rise in a high-rise fire, the powerful exhaust fans being used in the demolition drew them down toward the firefighters.

Fire officials say the fire companies had not performed required inspections of the 41-story building in the months preceding the blaze, thereby losing a chance to notice the sealed stairwells. Fire officers are known to have walked through the building in the months before the fire as they worked to recover human remains after the 9/11 attacks, but they, too, do not appear to have noted the blocked stairwells.